Anniversaries have a way of making us stop and reflect. Facebook seemed to understand this pull of memories when it introduced its “On This Day” feature in March 2015. Every few days when I open my app, I find myself looking back at what I
was doing six to eight years ago. This
practice sometimes makes me pause,
particularly as I come upon pictures of
loved ones who are now gone.

Lately, I seem to be spending more
time than usual contemplating memories
and anniversaries. On March 19, I
participated in my sixth Bataan Memorial
Death March at White Sands Missile
Range, N.M., with Disabled Sports USA’s
Warfighter Sports participants. This
year’s event commemorated the 75th
anniversary of the arduous 65-mile march
made in April 1942 by 75,000 Filipino and
American troops on the Bataan Peninsula
in the Philippines.

Eight of the original survivorsattended the 2017 march, including

99-year-old Ret. U.S. Army Col. Ben
Skardon, who walked the first 8. 5 miles of
the course for the 10th time. Throughout
the weekend, many conversations circled
around the factors that differentiated
the survivors from their less-fortunate
comrades. Participants often used
terms such as resilience, resolve and
resourcefulness to describe the survivors’
traits.

As I consider Human Resource
Executive®’s 30th anniversary and
how much human resources has

BY CAROL HARNETT • Benefits Columnist

changed over those years, I see
similarities between the Bataan
survivors’ intestinal fortitude and that
of HR executives. It’s been a long,
challenging march of time.

When I wrote about the first 25
years of employee-benefit trends
for HRE’s silver anniversary issue,
employers were becoming less
generous with some offerings and
more creative with others. We
witnessed less flexible paid-time off
and vacation policies, greater cost
sharing with most insurance products
(including health coverage), continued
growth in voluntary benefits and
a weak embrace of flexible-work
arrangements. Simultaneously, some
companies moved toward customized
benefits that incorporated non-traditional products such as pet, auto
and homeowner’s insurance and were
sold through private marketplaces.

As I review the last five years,
however, I’m more reflective than I
had been in the past. I’m as interested
in the sociological principles behind
employee benefits as economic drivers.

Perhaps it’s because, as Alfred, LordTennyson once wrote: “Knowledgecomes, but wisdom lingers.”Neil Ir win wrote in his March

17, 2017 New York Times column,

Economic View: . . . “[W]hileeconomists tend to view a job as astraightfor ward exchange of labor formoney, a wide body of sociologicalresearch shows how tied up work iswith a sense of purpose and identity.”I would add that, as we discussed inmy last column, the job benefits andperks employees truly care about arethose that offer them greater flexibility,autonomy and the ability to lead abetter life.

While Gallup’s 2017 State of the
American Workplace report emphasized
that 51 percent of employees would
change jobs for one that offered them
flexible hours, a new Pew Research
Center study found that paid leave
was valued by employees as much as
flexibility.

The Pew study revealed that
Americans largely support paid leave—
and most supporters say employers,
rather than the federal or state
government, should cover the costs.

Here are some of the data points fromthe research as they pertain to four keyelements of paid leave:•Eighty-five percent of Americanssay workers should receive paid leaveto deal with their own serious healthcondition and 62 percent believeemployers should pay for that.

• Next, 82 percent rank mothersreceiving paid leave following the birthor adoption of a child as important and

61 percent want employers to fund this.

• Sixty-two percent of people believe
fathers need paid leave after the birth
or adoption of a child and slightly more
than half think their companies need to
pay for this.

Americans also trust that employers
will gain from having robust paid-leave
policies and procedures. Almost three-quarters say that companies providing
paid leave are more likely than those
that don’t to attract and retain good
workers.

The Pew study also found great
confusion among employees regarding
their understanding of whether their
companies offered paid leave. Forty-three percent of employed Americans
said their employer offers them paid
leave, separate from vacation, sick
leave or paid time off, following the
birth or adoption of a child, to care
for a family member with a serious
health condition or to deal with their
own serious condition. However,
this percentage is considerably
higher than what the U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics reports. Based upon
its estimates from compensation
information provided by employers,
only 13 percent of workers received
pay as part of family or medical
leave benefits paid by their employer
(separate from vacation, sick leave or
paid-time off).

This suggests that some workers
who think they have access to
employer-paid family and medical
leave may not, in fact, have this benefit.

And that’s a problem, especially if this
misunderstanding causes people to
pass on contributing to employee-paid
disability coverage either through a
core/buy-up plan or voluntary offerings.

From both sociological and
attraction-and-retention perspectives,
employees want flexibility from their
companies. According to both Gallup
and the Pew Research Center, they
equally want to schedule when they
work (giving full consideration to
making certain they accomplish their
work objectives) and they want to be
paid if they need to leave the workplace
to care for themselves or a loved one.

They also want the flexibility to work
from home and receive paid time off
for routine physician’s appointments or
to deal with minor illnesses.

As we head into the future, HR
executives will have little choice but to
focus their energies on the overarching
theme of workplace flexibility and
more precisely, the topic of broad paid-time-off policies.